HAL won't load
 

Hello all.

After I managed to get X/nvidia running(See thread named NVIDIA Drivers + Slack 11 SMP kernel below) I decided to upgrade XFCE to version 4.4.

Installation went nice thanks to the help of this page(http://turkey.fvdh.net/~hanumizzle/xfce4-review/) and I got it up and running. I had small problems with dbus, that is the libdbus libraries had wrong names, but that was solved by linking. So far so good...

HAL however, is apparently needed for handling virtual devices and when I use USB units and so on, and it refuse to start. Thunar is also complaining about not finding the HAL daemon.

All I get is:

bash-3.1# /etc/rc.d/rc.hal start
Starting HAL daemon: failed
bash-3.1#

and nothing else. Nothing in logs or by using 'dmesg'.

I hope anyone can direct me to where to start search for a possible solution for this.

Thanks in advance.

Has rc.hal been set to be executable? You would do this as follows:

chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.hal

Then try to start the HAL daemon and see what happens.

The rc.hal should be executable as its the one I am using to start hal the that scrip who tells me hal wont start, but I checked just in case, and yep its as it should be :)

Duh.. your post poked my brains though, going to dig through that rc file to see if it drops leads somewhere to what happens.

Was your implementation of HAL upgraded from the default version in Slackware 11? I know that when these types of applications are upgraded that newer files are placed within the /etc/rc.d directory with the .new extension. I don't know if this is your case, but I have run into this before where the newer version did not work properly, and I had to use the original script and alter it somewhat to work properly.

I downloaded the package hal-0.5.8.1-i486-1kjz.tgz from linuxpackages(link: http://www.linuxpackages.net/pkg_details.php?id=10119) and installed it with installpkg

There's no rc.hal.new in /etc/rc.d to.

I checked the script and got a hint to check in /var/run/hald and it did place a pid file there as it it starts but I still get the Starting HAL daemon: failed message, and its nowhere to be seen in processes.

EDIT...

I also did all check from rc.hal manually up to the part where the script start it:

- /usr/sbin/hald is exececutable
- haldaemon exists in /etc/group and /etc/passwd
- No pid file in /var/run/hald exsists

After that point its just for the daemon to start and it .. fails.

Question:

Is there any other process it might depend on or a process it conflicts with I missed?

Sorry, I thought that there was a HAL package that came with Slackware 11. I typically install Dropline Gnome shortly after a new installation, and assumed that HAL was already in place prior.

I do recall that dbus and hal need to be started and stopped in a particular order. Offhand, I can't remember which is which. Unfortunately, I am not too versed with the ins and outs of HAL, or with many other aspects of Slackware to boot, to offer any helpful advice in terms of HAL dependencies and such. I know the hal package that comes with Dropline Gnome seems to work w/o problems for me. I would imagine that it could be installed separately from the rest. There doesn't appear to be a Slackbuild at Slackbuilds.org for HAL. Maybe compiling it from source and then installing will heed better results? Sorry I can't offer any more advice to you.

Thanks for taking the time to repond. I am currently checking if the hotplug start up. It seems hal depends on it and udev to be up according to http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=hal...ov_hal_linux26.

Before I updated to the 2.6 kernel my boot process stopped for a while while it searched for more hardware(prolly hotplug) but now it don't do that, it rushes through the boot(/etc/rc.d/rc.hotplug) is executable).


The tinkering goes on :)

It sounds as if you may have more problems than hal with your setup. Is udev a dependency for newer releases of hal? I had not used udev prior to Slackware 11, and hal seemed to function properly then. Good luck with tinkering.

I found that the version of Hal from linuxpackages.net was a waste of time. Try downloading the source and compiling yourself as I had to do. Then make sure that messagebus in running before you try and start Hal

Thanks.

I poked around and had to verify and get right dists(Some version conflicts) of both HAL and dbus, compiled and tada, all done. Works fine now.